Yesterday, Daniel Mietchen sent me an email with a link to a DFG webpage. The DFG is the largest German science funding agency. To my great surprise, the page contained a call for grant applications with the title (translated: "Virtual research environments - infrastructure and demos". I'm reading this call to mean that we should apply for funding to hire people, buy soft- and hardware and develop a collaborative research system. Here are a few key points:

• They talk about developing new or extending existing data-centered infrastructure, such as wikis, blogs, project-managment, primary data repositories, data-tagging etc. This all sounds like semantic web to me!
• The system has to facilitate collaboration between institutes locally, nationally and internationally.
  
• They also stress that they want to improve the cooperation between research institutes and their libraries.
• The money can be spent on personell, equipment, software and meetings. The text specifically mentions meetings with standard bodies.
• Any resulting software has to be made open source.
• Projects run for two years, extendable to three.
• Applications need to show how and which new technology will be developed and what the future value of it will be.
• Applications need to show how their projects are embeded into the current international scheme of things and how the projects would improve the situation in the long run.

This all sounds like an absolutely excellent opportunity for a whole host of things. Semantic data is of course the first thing that comes to mind. If the system is project-oriented, the contributions of each member to the project will be registered and one could use this for the development of a reputation system. Of course, the system should use OpenID and then it could be made interoperable with other similar/compatible systems and users could spread reputation over several systems. The possibilities are endless! Who would have thought that the DFG would be so innovative? I'm impressed!
OK, who wants to join me and apply for a grant there?